The temperature characteristics (TC) or frequency over temperature behavior of quartz resonators depend primarily on the crystallographic orientation of the quartz disks or strips cut. When electrodes are deposited on each side of the strip or disk, piezoelectric resonators are formed.
Efforts are being made in the quartz industry, to achieve an improved TC performance. Designers and manufacturers of quartz resonators are concentrating their efforts on methods for improving the precision and the consistency of cutting quartz disks and quartz strips, to a given (precise) crystallographic orientation. Although some progress has been made in this area, the precision and consistency of quartz cutting and processing is still producing quartz disks and quartz strips with a wide distribution of crystallographic orientations. This wide variation causes quartz disks and strips to be made that are outside certain desired crystallographic orientation specifications. Out-of-specification quartz resonators have undesirable or unusable temperature characteristics (Bechmann curves), that do not meet customer's TC requirements, in certain applications.
Thus, there is a need for an improved method of bringing quartz strips that are outside certain crystallographic specifications for a given application, and depositing electrodes as detailed herein, to in effect, rotate the effective Bechmann curve of the strip resonators, to bring an out-of-specification quartz strip resonator to within a predetermined specification. Accordingly, a method of rotating a Bechmann curve of a quartz strip resonator could lower waste of out-of-specification resonators, and would be considered an improvement over the prior art.